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50th anniversary of San Antonio’s historic healthcare partnership

In early December 1968, the newly built Bexar County Hospital (today known as University Health System) threw open its doors to welcome its first patients at its impressive $17-million, 334-bed medical institution.

That proved to be a seminal moment in San Antonio’s history: transforming its ability to serve its growing community, establishing a distinct partnership between its newly opened public hospital and its newly opened medical school (University of Texas Medical School in San Antonio), and sparking a period of dramatic healthcare industry growth in acreage that once consisted of dairy pastureland.

“We are free to progress, to experiment,” Douglas Mitchell, the new hospital’s head administrator, boasted at the time. Dr. F. Carter Pannill, the first dean of San Antonio’s new medical school, echoed Mitchell’s enthusiasm: “It’s the first time in American medical history that a medical school and hospital have been designed and built as a matched pair.” The San Antonio Light wrote in its special Sunday section in November of 1968, “Not only is the 13-story structure beautiful and imposing, its very appearance gives promise of high-quality medical care.”

Five decades later, the formerly known Bexar County Hospital has grown into the bustling South Texas Medical Center, an economic powerhouse for Bexar County. In fact, today, San Antonio’s health and biosciences industry creates more than one in six local jobs, and pumps about $40 billion a year into the local economy. What’s more, the longstanding partnership between organizations known now as University Health System and UT Health San Antonio have worked together to heal countless sick and injured; educated tens of thousands of physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals; and developed new and better treatments through science and discovery.

These tremendous accomplishments, however, may have never come to fruition. Since before 1944, local leaders tried and failed to bring a medical school to San Antonio, and not until 1959 did the Legislature finally authorize the creation of a school. But a savvy Dallas-based senator, hoping to slow or stop the project, inserted a last-minute amendment requiring a teaching hospital be located within a mile of the school.

In response, Bexar County voters overwhelmingly approved a $5 million bond to build a new hospital, supplemented by a $10 million federal grant. Ground broke in the Spring of 1966, but, in yet another setback, County Commissioners need to go back to the voters to seek hospital operating costs, which had been estimated to total $15 million for the first year. While the measure failed at the ballot box, Bexar County Judge Blair Reeves cast the deciding vote on moving forward with the tax increase, despite the initial voter rejection, and he paved the way for Bexar County Hospital and the medical school to open as planned two years later.

Leaders like Judge Reeves believed the healthcare venture would not only spur the economy of South Texas, but also, lead to better care of the community. They envisioned a place dedicated to the ideals of healing, teaching and research, and that birthed revolutionary medical theories and practices, which would impact the lives of people in the city, state, nation, and beyond.

“I think it’s safe to predict that five years from now, the medical school alone will be pouring $8 million to $10 million a year back into the San Antonio economy,” said Dr. Panill in 1968.

He knew he’d joined the start of something big.

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